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Patsy Tebeau
Patsy Tebeau was a pugnacious competitor from the mean streets of St. Louis who sought any advantage he thought he could gain. His tactics delivered a brand of baseball that clearly was much dirtier than you see in the modern game. Bill James has written about 19th century baseball: “The tactics of the eighties were aggressive; the tactics of the nineties were violent. The game of the eighties was crude; the game of the nineties was criminal. The baseball of the eighties had ugly elements; the game of the nineties was just ugly.” Tebeau, along with rivals Cap Anson and John McGraw, was a leader in 1890s baseball and helped cement the reputation of this era.
After his retirement from baseball, Tebeau focused on his saloon business with fellow St. Louis native ‘Scrappy’ Bill Joyce. In 1914, The Sporting News noted, “[Tebeau] has prospered and grown portly until Cleveland fans who had known him in the old days would hardly recognize him.” His downtown saloon was a popular place among baseball men, and he was known as a gentleman of integrity who would treat his old baseball enemies as friends. However, by 1918 he was not a happy man. He suffered from rheumatism and some type of stomach trouble which made it difficult for him to move around. His wife left him and moved back to Cleveland in 1917. After a trip to French Lick, Indiana, he returned to his saloon in St. Louis despondent. In the early morning hours on May 16, 1918, he ended his own life in the back room of his saloon with a bullet from a revolver. - SABR
Redid the facegen. Both he and his brother George made the Inaugural draft of my Random Debut league...
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